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拍品专文
A monumentally exuberant sculpture in clay, Nº 7 (2003) exemplifies Rebecca Warren’s often vivacious, awkward, poignant and voluptuous portrayals of the female nude. It has been held in the same private collection since the year it was made. The figure is over six feet high, headless like an Ancient Greek Venus, and statuesque in more ways than one. With rounded, oversized calves and buttocks topped with a large single breast, it marches forward with arms stretched gleefully towards the sky. The surface is pummelled and pitted with the marks of the maker’s hands. Feet fused to a mountainous pile-up of clay, it stands on an MDF trolley, like an escapee from the artist’s studio. Working within a broad tradition of Classical antiquity, Modernism and Pop culture, including artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Umberto Boccioni, and cartoonist Robert Crumb, Warren’s sculptures are in continual, fervent search for their own meanings and standing within art history at large.
Warren came of age during the era of the Young British Artists, and was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize for a series of clay works. Jonathan Jones identified her as ‘an original and formidable talent: the truest artist the Turner has uncovered in years’ (J. Jones, ‘Why Rebecca Warren is Turner prize gold’, The Guardian, 3 October 2006). She has continued to develop her unique, rough-hewn vernacular since, sometimes translating her forms into hand-painted bronze. The physical act of manipulating clay remains primary in her process. Riffing on the work of a wide range of artistic forebears, she asserts her own authority, finding ways in which to seriously exalt and comically extrude the female human form. At once whimsical, satirical, and saturated with intense and serious beauty, her works’ rich, deftly-modelled surfaces are alive with touch, immediacy and sensual surprise.
A hybrid, golem-like figure declaring its own formal and sculptural laws, Nº 7 exudes a palpable and unruly creativity. It relates closely to other works which were shown in SHE, Warren’s 2003 solo show at Maureen Paley, London. These were ‘sculptures with great panache and a commanding physical presence,’ writes Bice Curiger. ‘… They proudly wear the signs of their making, of their creation with hands and tools. Internally, they also carry phantom images from a palette that ranges from Rodin to Maillol, via de Kooning and Fontana, all the way to Walt Disney and Hollywood B movies. In a complex and blithely subversive way they are thus also revenants from the history of art and popular culture’ (B. Curiger, ‘In all things a song lies sleeping’, in Rebecca Warren: Every Aspect of Bitch Magic, London 2012, p. 11).
Warren came of age during the era of the Young British Artists, and was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize for a series of clay works. Jonathan Jones identified her as ‘an original and formidable talent: the truest artist the Turner has uncovered in years’ (J. Jones, ‘Why Rebecca Warren is Turner prize gold’, The Guardian, 3 October 2006). She has continued to develop her unique, rough-hewn vernacular since, sometimes translating her forms into hand-painted bronze. The physical act of manipulating clay remains primary in her process. Riffing on the work of a wide range of artistic forebears, she asserts her own authority, finding ways in which to seriously exalt and comically extrude the female human form. At once whimsical, satirical, and saturated with intense and serious beauty, her works’ rich, deftly-modelled surfaces are alive with touch, immediacy and sensual surprise.
A hybrid, golem-like figure declaring its own formal and sculptural laws, Nº 7 exudes a palpable and unruly creativity. It relates closely to other works which were shown in SHE, Warren’s 2003 solo show at Maureen Paley, London. These were ‘sculptures with great panache and a commanding physical presence,’ writes Bice Curiger. ‘… They proudly wear the signs of their making, of their creation with hands and tools. Internally, they also carry phantom images from a palette that ranges from Rodin to Maillol, via de Kooning and Fontana, all the way to Walt Disney and Hollywood B movies. In a complex and blithely subversive way they are thus also revenants from the history of art and popular culture’ (B. Curiger, ‘In all things a song lies sleeping’, in Rebecca Warren: Every Aspect of Bitch Magic, London 2012, p. 11).